THE SCIENCE OF TEENY TINY ANTS / MY MOM THINKS I’M COOL

I pay $825 a month of my parents’ money to live in a very cozy basement apartment that I share with my boyfriend and about thirty three million teeny tiny ants. We live well and have grown accustomed to our small, smushable roommates. When we first moved in, I found the ant situation to be problematic. One night I left a peach pit, still slightly juicy with the fruit’s meat, sitting on the coffee table. The next morning pandemonium had most certainly ensued. Ants from far and wide had been summoned to feast on the glorious nectar. As they festered and scuttled, I watched them with unease. My garbage was their party, my mistake was their miracle: a great gifted peach pit from above. Oh, it was hideous.

It occurred to me that this was the perfect opportunity to do some mass killing. The ants were baited and assembled– now all I had to do was pull the trigger. And by trigger, I mean blow their bodies apart by spraying them with heavy-duty 409 kitchen cleaner. I learned this trick from my mom, who by the way thinks I’m really cool (did you see the comment she posted on my first PYRAMIDROME entry? She totally dug it). 409 is like this phenomenal insect annihilator– its human-scale equivalent would be to spray ascorbic acid directly into a huge crowd with a fire hose. Anyway, the point is basically that I made the mistake of leaving out some tasty garbage, which allowed a large quantity of ants to have a big party. But then, in the end, they all had their limbs ripped off and then were tragically drowned in a sea of poison. I’ll bet they didn’t even see it coming, and as they were chemically turned to dust in front of my very eyes, I reached for an extra-absorbent paper towel. I felt really bad for a second, but then I didn’t care anymore. I mean, they’re ants… right?! Oh, what a moment of sheer PYRAMIDROMIC elucidation.

You see, basically, we’re all just like these teeny tiny ants (my dad once told me that ants were smarter than humans, and that they may one day rule the earth). Last night I walked up Bernal Hill and watched the sun set over Downtown San Francisco. Just as the streetlights were turning on and rush hour traffic was beginning to die down, the sky turned into a terrific RGB radiation of color. I looked out over the city while people all over were coming home, entering their tiny houses, heating up canned soup with even teeny tinier pots and pans. Little eensie weenie Chihuahua dogs were barking and babies were drinking their itty bitty baby bottles of nighttime milk, and hobos were jingling their even smaller coin stashes in their little pathetic Styrofoam cups. Everything was going on at a normal speed of the earth’s rotation, cars were moving up and down the streets, stopping at red lights and beaming their headlights across tree tops like little meaningless Broadway moments. It occurred to me that once I went back down there, into my own little tiny basement, the ants would still be there, teeny as ever. It was like, OK, so I’m just an ant down there, killing even littler ants. But up here, I’m big, and I can have it all! I guess this observation is one of those cliché “I lived through the 60s, man” type of sayings… you know, “we’re all just pawns in the cog” or whatever. But it’s true! Size is so relative. At the top of the world, nothing can take you down. The scale of the earth is infinite, and though the possibilities are not endless (don’t ever trust anyone who tells you this), they are certainly there.

GET AT ME!

twitter: @willak